Rowling hopes play goes global
London is under Harry Potter’s spell once more — and author J.K. Rowling hopes the rest of the world will eventually follow.
The stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child had its gala opening Saturday in London’s West End and is already the theatre event of the year.
Rowling joined director John Tiffany, playwright Jack Thorne and the cast onstage to receive a raucous standing ovation at the end of the two-part show at London’s Palace Theatre, where it’s scheduled to run at least until December 2017.
If the boy wizard’s creator has her way, that will only be the beginning.
“I’d like as many Potter fans to see it as possible,” Rowling said on the red carpet before the show, as fans cheered and poked camera phones over crowd barriers in hope of getting a picture.
There’s already talk of a Broadway run, and Rowling said: “I’d like it to go wider than that.”
Co-producer Sonia Friedman said she had big hopes for the show, which has been more than two years in the making.
“Hopefully many countries at some point will get to see it,” Friedman said. “But it’s a big piece of theatre, it’s a big endeavour. You can’t just turn this around overnight.”
The play has been in previews at the theatre for almost eight weeks, but few details of the plot have leaked (though those seeking spoilers online will find them).
People leaving the show are handed buttons urging them to #keepthesecrets — and most have complied.
The script of the play has just been published, with a global print run in the millions, so future audiences will have more opportunities to know the plot in advance if they choose.
Without entering spoiler territory, it’s safe to say the play has much to make fans rejoice. This is both an eighth instalment in the Potter saga worthy of Rowling’s seven novels, and a stage spectacle to delight even the uninitiated.
The script — written by Thorne from a story by Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany — picks up 19 years after the end of the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Harry — the orphaned boy whose destiny was to save the wizarding world — is now an overworked civil servant at the Ministry of Magic, feeling the approach of middle age. His younger son, Albus Severus, is a reluctant pupil at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, struggling with the burden of his family’s fame.
Fans who know the saga inside out are likely to appreciate the teeming detail of the play, which runs for five hours over two parts. It captures Rowling’s richly textured magical world, with its Byzantine mythology, complex history and array of fantastical creatures.
Rowling said she hoped the show would attract “people who have never been to the theatre before.”
“I would be so proud to think that kids from my kind of background, who didn’t come from particularly theatregoing families, learn what theatre is all about through this show,” Rowling said. “That would be an incredible thing.”